Nashville International Airport (BNA) is celebrating the city’s legacy with a 140ft-high digital art installation created by Studio Gentilhomme.
Located in the airport’s Grand Lobby, the immersive multimedia memento is intended to portray the city’s character through nature, sports and nightlife. It was designed by Montreal-based Gentilhomme Studio at the invitation of The Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority in collaboration with Burns Engineering.
In the security zone, passengers will be greeted by two monumental adjacent displays portraying cultural staples belonging to the Music City and its surrounding region. Spanning two panoramic screens, each 70ft wide at 24K combined resolution, video capsules pay homage to Nashville.
Under the mantra “good times await your return”, the Gentilhomme team produced hours of original video content including advanced CGI and live action filmmaking captured in more than 20 locations within Nashville and the surrounding Tennessee areas, including Reelfoot Lake, Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Clingmans Dome. The installation reinvents the digital signage experience with widgets that come alive in real time, offering a unique solution to the way information is displayed alongside entertainment in public spaces.
Passengers traveling through Nashville will be greeted by over a dozen vignettes experienced as massive digital art postcards.
Highlights include Art of Making, which was filmed at two local music institutions, Nashville Guitar Company and Delgado Guitars. In this piece, passengers see a guitar fabricated from start to finish, including the selection and working of wood, all the way to the finished product. Hall of Fame showcases vinyl records as a symbol of Nashville’s status as the Music City. Distillation exhibits the city’s infamous whiskey distillation process with a mechanical wall full of pipes, gears and various machinery pieces that are animated to depict the stages, from grain preparation all the way to aging.
City of Lights is a vibrant scene from the city’s cultural epicentre, Broadway Street, in full action. To produce this segment, Gentilhomme closed the iconic nightlife strip for two days, converting it into a live action film set. Nashville by Night takes passengers on an aerial journey through the city’s downtown skyline, filmed in 8K slow motion using drone and time lapse cinematography, while nature-focused vignettes pay homage to Tennessee's natural wonders, from lush green forests, waterfalls and cypress trees to the Great Smoky Mountains and freshwater streams.
And then there’s Sports in Nashville, a game-time capsule celebrating Nashville’s thriving sports culture, teams including the Tennessee Titans, Nashville Soccer Club, Nashville Sounds and the Predators.
Imparting the first and last impression travellers have of the city, the work will be the cornerstone of the airport’s Project 3 of the BNA Vision to maintain Nashville International Airport as a world-class facility, and to accommodate a record-breaking increase of an expected 23 million annual passengers.
The installation opened on January 24, 2023. It was conceptualised and produced in-house by Gentilhomme with Burns Engineering, Hensel Phelps, Corgan, Fentress Architects, International Display Systems, Smart Monkeys, Pixera and Omnivex.
All images: Maxime Roux/ Gentilhomme
